TOC/MOC panel to navigation, discover, organize subset of vault files

Newbie - maybe asking a dumb question… :bowing_man:

I was looking for the answer to the original question about a TOC/MOC organization of some subset of vault-documents in an author-organizable outline for navigation and editing.

Was such a plugin ever released or created?

I have seen that you can get an outline of the HEADER sections of single markdown document. But that is not at all the same thing as I am looking for, or what I believe the original author was looking for.

Desire is to be able to have an author organized hierarchy outline of notes (MOC) from within a vault to support navigation, discovery, organization. Much like one would see in a “HELP” outline view like in a Windows CHM viewer, or MDN sidebar of topics, or MSDN sidebar of topics. Where, in this case, it is a plugin-panel for organizing a subset of a vaults markdowns into a TOC. Even better if it actually maintained a deeplink/scheme based set of URLs to allow an outline that spanned multiple vaults.

Thank you in advance for any pointers or suggestions

:guide_dog:

p.s., in essence this would be a peer to the builtin file-folder panel view that shows everything in the vault and collates everything based on alphabetical order and folder containment. One might want more than one of these within a vault. So they would ideally be implemented as a YAML/JSON file where the plugin panel managed that file and allowed presentation, and tracked file-folder move/renames etc.

Which, for reference, is exactly how Visual Studio manages virtual-file-folder views of a C++ project.

I’m not totally sure I understand the request. It sounds like you would just write a list of links by hand?

Imagine you just took the File explorer pane view as it now exists.

Then you set the collation to be oldest-newest creation date.

Then you dragged files around to to rearrange their collation order. When you did so, it automatically changed their creation date to maintain the collation order you selection by drag-dropping.

If you use the Chrome browser and use it, for example, to organize your URL link ordering you already experience a similar capability for user collation ordering.

In effect this panel would allow you to create a named-VIEW (subset of your vault faults) organized in a hierarchical outline and keep the links and names up to date as you worked. With the added concept that you could also “hide” files and create virtual folders.

There are quite a few tools and products that offer this kind of capability. It is most useful when authoring help guides and other documentation and you want to keep things virtually filtered and collated independent of their actual file/folder containment. It is the manual analogue to what a tag-based MOC attempts to achieve with DataView. But in this case it is a side-panel that provides an alternative filtered view of vault’s file-explorer views.

If it was easier to copy-paste a graphic or video I could show a couple examples of this in various tools.

OK, I think I mostly understand.

Here are some options. I think none of them fully match what you want, but maybe they will help.

The Bartender plugin lets you reorder things in the File Explorer. It’s still in beta, so it’s kind of buggy and it’s not in the community repo yet. I think you only get 1 custom view, and maybe you can toggle between it and the normal views; I forget. I haven’t used it.

For small subsets of the vault:

  • The core Starred plugin lets you build up a list of notes (and saved searches) that you can reorder. You can only have 1 Starred panel.
  • You can write a list of links in a hierarchical list in a note (and put it in a sidebar, if you want). You can have as many as will fit. You can generate an initial list to work with in various ways, like running a search and copying the results.

Keeping names and links up to date is how Obsidian works in general, so you don’t need to worry about that by default (tho depending what you do and what settings you use it’s possible to have it not happen).

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